The recent death of Harold Franklin, Auburn University’s first Black student, caused me to reflect back on the day he registered and attended his first class.  January 4, 1964, was the start of winter quarter and I had driven in from Tuskegee that morning not expecting the tight security and tension that was in the […]

This week we mourn the loss of a true American hero. Freedom Rider Dr. Ernest “Rip” Patton has passed away at the age of eighty-one after a brief illness. Dr. Patton was a twenty-one-year-old student drum major in the band at Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee University) when he joined the Freedom Rides in May 1961. […]

One of the recent losses from the pandemic was the cancellation in Decatur, Georgia, on last Sunday of a celebration of one of our authors turning one hundred years old: the Reverend J. Phillips Noble. NewSouth Books published his memoir, Beyond the Burning Bus: The Civil Rights Revolution in a Southern Town, in 2003. Reverend Noble was […]

C.T. Vivian, who died on the same day as his close friend John Lewis roughly one year ago, was celebrated this month in a program featuring some notable guests: Don Lemon, CNN host; Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.; Andrew Young, civil rights leader and former US ambassador; Al Vivian, son of C.T.; […]

Bob Moses, one of the most courageous human beings to have walked this earth, died July 25, 2021. Tributes have been pouring in from many who knew Bob or knew of him, including President Barack Obama, who said: “Bob was a hero of mine. His quiet confidence helped shape the civil rights movement, and he inspired generations of […]

Seventy years ago, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led a walk-out at R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, in protest of Jim Crow segregation, specifically the so-called separate-but-equal education policies which had been the law in the South since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The school Johns attended indeed was separate, but it was in […]

If you’ve read East of Texas, West of Hell, you will likely say crime noir is the specialty of Rod Davis. Considering it’s the second in a noir series after the award-winning South, America, you would not be wrong. But that statement scarcely scratches the surface where his talents are concerned. Davis is that rare […]

The thirteen American colonies are part of our national mythos, a piece of patriotic lore inextricable from our very identity. A new book from historian Mike Bunn, by the name of Fourteenth Colony, offers compelling reasons to change our thinking. Fourteenth Colony covers the colonial period during which the British occupied the area along the […]

For the winter quarter of 2021, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Alabama institutions and artists $270,000, supporting the best and brightest creators in the state. NewSouth Books is proud to announce that Jacqueline Trimble, author of American Happiness, received twenty-five thousand of those dollars in support of the furtherance of her work as […]

Envirojournalist Ben Raines has been passionate about the natural world for his entire life, a good bit of which has been spent quietly exploring the Mobile-Tensaw Delta by boat. His new book, Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation‘s Most Biodiverse River System, is the ultimate expression of that mission, as is evidenced in […]